Boston is a long flight from Kenya — 22 hours long, in fact. That’s enough time to sleep, eat, read, watch countless YouTube videos and do it all over again, an experience that could make adults antsy, let alone two little boys. Yet it was a journey that Jane Nduta and Humphrey Njogu were eager to make. …

In the fall of last year, a young woman named Gerdline walked into Hospital Saint-Nicholas in Saint-Marc, Haiti, carrying her baby son Rolensky. Only four months old, the boy was in a bad way: thin, breathing rapidly and lethargic, with a bluish tinge to his skin.

Little did Gerdline know as she crossed the hospital threshold that Rolensky’s heart was failing—because of a one-in-a-million blood vessel malformation in his brain. Nor did she know that the two of them would soon be on a plane to Boston, where doctors from across Boston Children’s Hospital would come together around her boy to save his heart by fixing his brain. …